The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past

by John Lewis Gaddis

We resist letting contemporary concerns influence us—the term “presentism,” among historians, is no compliment. We advance bravely into the future with our eyes fixed firmly on the past: the image we present to the world is, to put it bluntly, that of a rear end.

direct experience of events isn’t necessarily the best path toward understanding them, because your field of vision extends no further than your own immediate senses. You lack the capacity, when trying to figure out how to survive a famine, or flee a band of brigands, or fight from within a suit of armor, to function as a historian might do.

For if you think of the past as a landscape, then history is the way we represent it, and it’s that act of representation that lifts us above the familiar to let us experience vicariously what we can’t experience directly: a wider view.

Self-doubt must always precede self-confidence. It should never, however, cease to accompany, challenge, and by these means discipline self-confidence.

I like it because it makes two points: first, that we’re bound to learn from the past whether or not we make the effort, since it’s the only data base we have; and second, that we might as well try to do so systematically.

that if we can widen the range of experience beyond what we as individuals have encountered, if we can draw upon the experiences of others who’ve had to confront comparable situations in the past, then—although there are no guarantees—our chances of acting wisely should increase proportionately.

that the act of interpreting is itself a vicarious enlargement of experience from which you can benefit.

This gets us close to what historians do—or at least, to echo Machiavelli, should have the odor of doing: it is to interpret the past for the purposes of the present with a view to managing the future, but to do so without suspending the capacity to assess the particular circumstances in which one might have to act, or the relevance of past actions to them. To accumulate experience is not to endorse its automatic application, for part of historical consciousness is the ability to see differences as well as similarities, to understand that generalizations do not always hold in particular circumstances.

The fascination of sports resides in the intersection of the general with the particular. The practice of life is much the same.

Studying the past is no sure guide to predicting the future. What it does do, though, is to prepare you for the future by expanding experience, so that you can increase your skills, your stamina—and, if all goes well, your wisdom.

Historians, in contrast, employ abstraction to overcome a different constraint, which is their separation in time from their subjects.

We’re supposed to be solid, dispassionate chroniclers of events, not given to allowing our emotions and our intuitions to affect what we do, or so we’ve traditionally been taught. I worry, though, that if we don’t allow for these things, and for the sense of excitement and wonder they bring to the doing of history, then we’re missing much of what the field is all about.

Selectivity. To be transported, in a conventional time machine, to a particular point in the past would be to have significances imposed on you.

Millions of people over thousands of years have crossed the Rubicon, E. H. Carr pointed out in What Is History? We decide which ones we want to write about.

Simultaneity. Even more striking than selectivity is the capacity history gives you for simultaneity, for the ability to be at once in more than a single place or time.

The Culture of Time and Space,

Scale. A third way in which historians’ time machines exceed the capability of those in science fiction is the ease with which they can shift the scale from the macroscopic to the microscopic, and back again.

We might define the future, then, as the zone within which contingencies and continuities coexist independently of one another; the past as the place where their relationship is inextricably fixed; and the present as the singularity that brings the two together, so that continuities intersect contingencies, contingencies encounter continuities, and through this process history is made.

So too it would be imprudent for historians to decide, from the fact that we have no absolute basis for measuring time and space, that they can’t know anything about what happened within them.

“No expert on the Napoleonic Wars has ever heard the sound of the cannon at Austerlitz.”

Like geologists and paleontologists, they must allow for the fact that most sources from the past don’t survive, and that most daily events don’t even generate a survivable record in the first place. Like biologists and astrophysicists, they must deal with ambiguous or even contradictory evidence.

the reality on the ground, what the experts made of that reality, and what they could persuade their superiors to accept.

I get curious about a problem and start reading up on it. What I read causes me to redefine the problem. Redefining the problem causes me to shift the direction of what I’m reading. That in turn further reshapes the problem, which further redirects the reading. I go back and forth like this until it feels right, then I write it up and ship it off to the publisher.

Historians too often retreat in confusion when social scientists reproach them for not using equations, graphs, matrices, and the other methods of formal modeling to represent the past. We’re not being “scientific,” we’re told, when we subvert generalizations, resist ranking causes, and reject the use of discipline-specific jargon. We might well respond, though, by asking: what are zoologists and botanists doing when they seek out distinctive species? Or: how would an astronomer rank the causes that produced the solar system, or the earth’s position within it? Or: why do so many “hard” scientists write so much better than most social scientists—and have so many more readers?41 Such responses might not satisfy our critics. But they would certainly boost our morale.

The answer, I think, is that these disciplines prefer reductionist over ecological methods of inquiry because they see in reductionism the only feasible way to generalize about the past in such a way as to be able to forecast the future.

“rational choice” assumptions in economics and political science, which maintain that people calculate their own best interests objectively and on the basis of accurate information about the circumstances within which these exist; (2) “structural functionalism” in sociology, which sees institutions as necessary components of the particular social structures within which they are embedded; (3) “modernization” theory, which insists that all nations go through similar stages of economic development; (4) the “where you stand depends on where you sit” argument in organizational studies—also known as Miles’s Law—which explains the behavior of bureaucracies, large and small, in terms of an overriding concern with self-perpetuation; (5) Freudian psychology, which seeks to account for the actions of individuals by invoking a set of unconscious impulses and inhibitions inherited—by everyone—from childhood; and (6) “realist” and “neorealist” theories of international relations, which claim that all nations seek, in all situations, to maximize their power.

“The historian’s business is to know the past, not to know the future,” R. G. Collingwood insisted, “and whenever historians claim to be able to determine the future in advance of its happening, we may know with certainty that something has gone wrong with their fundamental conception of history.”

We do, however, normally embed our generalizations within our narratives. In seeking to show how past processes have produced present structures, we draw upon whatever theories we can find that will help us accomplish that task.

It surely caused me to reconsider a proposition I’d absorbed long ago from “realist” theorists of international relations: that democracies have greater difficulties than autocracies in aligning their policies with their interests.

Historians believe in contingent, not categorical, causation.

We see history as proceeding instead from multiple causes and their intersections. Interconnections matter more to us than does the enshrinement of particular variables.

Historians prefer simulations to modeling.

Historians generalize, therefore, but only from the knowledge of particular outcomes: that’s what I mean by particular generalization. We derive processes from surviving structures; but because we understand that a shift in those processes at any point could have produced a different structure, we make few if any claims about the future.

The moral of the fable is that armaments make impressive exoskeletons, but that a shell alone ensures the survival of no animal and no state.

The theory would be this: that the health and ultimately the survival of states depends upon their maintaining a combination of life-support systems in balance with one another, and with their external environment. If any one of them gets out of whack and nothing is done, its collapse can affect all the others.

“It does not follow that, because a mountain appears to take on different shapes from different angles of vision, it has objectively either no shape at all or an infinity of shapes.”

The idea here is that the frequency of events is inversely proportional to their intensity. That sounds pretty abstract, until you put it in terms of earthquakes. There are, it turns out, several hundred of these in California each day. The vast majority, however, are imperceptible, falling within category three or below on the well-known Richter scale, in which the numbers go up by one as the intensity goes up by ten. Category four and five earthquakes, which you can feel but which do little or no damage, are fortunately less frequent, and it’s even more fortunate that the really damaging earthquakes are the rarest of all. The pattern is sufficiently consistent that it can be expressed mathematically: double the energy released in the earthquake, and it becomes roughly four times as rare.40

Complexity, M. Mitchell Waldrop

principle of diminishing relevance: it is that the greater the time that separates a cause from a consequence, the less relevant we presume that cause to be. Notice that I didn’t use the term “irrelevant,” although Carr at one point did in dismissing what he called “accidental” causes.

Causes always have contexts, and to know the former we must understand the latter.

“Historians,” he writes, “instinctively stop the backward search for the ultimate cause at the point where the state of affairs, whose alteration they seek to explain, flourished.”19 This is a rather clumsy way of stating, for history, a principle paleontologists have more elegantly called punctuated equilibrium. It has to do with the fact that evolution doesn’t proceed at a steady rate; rather, long periods of stability are “punctuated” by abrupt and destabilizing changes.

Roberts suggests that we do this by seeking a “point of no return”: the moment at which an equilibrium that once existed ceased to do so as a result of whatever it is we’re trying to explain.

What we’re looking for, then, as we trace processes that led to particular structures, is the point at which these processes took a distinctive, or abnormal, or unforeseen course. We’re searching for phase transitions, for punctuations in some existing equilibrium, for an exceptional event that reflected general conditions but that could not have been predicted from them.23 Or, as Aristotle put it in the Poetics, for those moments “when things come about contrary to expectation but because of one another.”24 How, though, do we know what the expectations prior to the event may have been?

You can’t experiment with single variables that weren’t within the range of the technology or the culture of the times. Within these limits, though, counterfactual reasoning can help to establish chains of causation: to argue that the Japanese might not have attacked Pearl Harbor if the American oil embargo hadn’t been imposed; or to claim that the Americans might not have chosen to cut off the oil flow if the Japanese hadn’t moved into French Indochina—these are perfectly legitimate positions for historians to take.

First, a preference for parsimony in consequences, but not causes. By this, I mean that the causes we identify must converge upon a particular consequence.

Second, the subordination of generalization to narration. A simulation is not a system. It’s a representation of what happened, but it tells us little about what’s going to happen.

Third, a distinction between timeless and time-bound logic. Some historical findings require no research, just common sense. You don’t have to be a professional historian to understand that causes must precede consequences, or that correlations are not necessarily causes. These are universally valid propositions, at least throughout this universe.

Fourth, an integration of induction and deduction. Since we’re historians, not novelists, we’re obliged to tie our narrative as closely as possible to the evidence that has survived: that’s an inductive process.

Finally, replicability. The representation—or narrative, or simulation—must command a consensus among those who use it that its correspondence with reality is a close one.

Historians are—or ought to be—open to diverse ways of organizing knowledge: our reliance on micro- rather than macro-generalization opens up for us a wide range of methodological approaches.